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Defend Our Country Digest

Defend Our Country Digest — August 29, 2022

By August 29, 2022No Comments

Driving the Day: 

Must Read Stories

Donald Trump Wages War On The National Archives, While One Of His Top Allies Threatens “Riots In The Streets” If Trump Is Held Accountable For Breaking The Law 

  • Washington Post: Inside Trump’s war on the National Archives: In the nearly three weeks since the FBI searched former president Donald Trump’s Florida home to recover classified documents, the National Archives and Records Administration has become the target of a rash of threats and vitriol, according to people familiar with the situation. Civil servants tasked by law with preserving and securing the U.S. government’s records were rattled. On Wednesday, the agency’s head sent an email to the staff. Though academic and suffuse with legal references, the message from acting archivist Debra Steidel Wall was simple: Stay above the fray and stick to the mission. “NARA has received messages from the public accusing us of corruption and conspiring against the former President, or congratulating NARA for ‘bringing him down,’ ” Steidel Wall wrote in the agencywide message, which was obtained by The Washington Post. “Neither is accurate or welcome.” The email capped a year-long saga that has embroiled the Archives — widely known for being featured in the 2004 Nicolas Cage movie, “National Treasure” — in a protracted fight with Trump over classified documents and other records that were taken when he left office.
  • The Hill: Graham Predicts ‘Riots In The Streets’ If Trump Prosecuted Over Classified Docs: Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) on Sunday warned of “riots in the streets” if former President Trump is prosecuted for his handling of classified materials found when the FBI searched his Mar-a-Lago home. “If there’s a prosecution of Donald Trump for mishandling classified information, after the Clinton debacle… there’ll be riots in the streets,” Graham told former South Carolina congressman Trey Gowdy, who now hosts Fox News’ “Sunday Night in America.” Trump shared a clip of the interview on Truth Social later Sunday evening. Gowdy was chairman of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, which probed the 2012 terror attacks in Libya that left four Americans dead and uncovered a private email server used by Clinton. Graham expressed concern that Trump is treated with “a double standard” and repeated his warning of riots regarding the Georgia special grand jury investigating attempts by Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 election results in the state.

Election Data Breach Draws The Attention Of The Fulton County Investigation 

  • New York Times: Election Data Breach Attracts Georgia Investigators: The day after Donald J. Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol, a small group working on his behalf traveled to rural Coffee County, Ga., about 200 miles southeast of Atlanta. One member of the group was Paul Maggio, an executive at a firm based in Atlanta called SullivanStrickler, which helps organizations analyze and manage their data. His company had been hired by Sidney Powell, a conspiracy theorist and lawyer advising Mr. Trump, who was tasked with scouring voting systems in Georgia and other states. It was part of an effort by Trump allies in a number of swing states to access and copy sensitive election software, with the help of friendly election administrators. “We are on our way to Coffee County, Georgia, to collect what we can from the election/voting machines and systems,” Mr. Maggio wrote to Ms. Powell on the morning of Jan. 7, 2021, according to an email exchange that recently emerged in civil litigation. Weeks later, Scott Hall, an Atlanta-area Trump supporter and bail bondsman who traveled to Coffee County on a chartered plane, described what he and the group did there. “We scanned every freaking ballot,” he said in a recorded phone conversation in March 2021. Mr. Hall said that the team had the blessing of the local elections board and “scanned all the equipment, imaged all the hard drives and scanned every single ballot.” This week, court filings revealed that the Coffee County data breach is now part of the sprawling investigation into election interference being conducted by Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Ga., which encompasses most of Atlanta. Though Coffee County is well outside of her jurisdiction, Ms. Willis is seeking to build a broad conspiracy and racketeering case that encompasses multifaceted efforts by Trump allies to disrupt and overturn the lawful election of Joseph R. Biden Jr. 

What Will Happen If Election Deniers Get Elected To Run Elections? 

  • Politico: Here’s What Could Happen When An Election Denier Becomes A Chief Election Official: Many of the election deniers running for secretary of state this year have spent their time talking about something they can’t do: “decertifying” the 2020 results. The bigger question — amid concerns about whether they would fairly administer the 2024 presidential election — is exactly what powers they would have if they win in November. Atop the list of the most disruptive things they could do is refusing to certify accurate election results — a nearly unprecedented step that would set off litigation in state and federal court. That has already played out on a smaller scale this year, when a small county in New Mexico refused to certify election results over unfounded fears about election machines, until a state court ordered them to certify. But secretaries of states’ roles in elections stretch far beyond approving vote tallies and certifying results. Many of the candidates want to dramatically change the rules for future elections, too. The Donald Trump-aligned Republican nominees in a number of presidential battleground states have advocated for sweeping changes to election law, with a particular focus on targeting absentee and mail voting in their states — keying off one of Trump’s obsessions. And even if they cannot push through major changes to state law using allies in the legislatures, they could still complicate and frustrate elections through the regulatory directives that guide the day-to-day execution of election procedures by county officials in their states.
  • Newsweek: Wyoming Looks to Limit Secretary of State Power After 2020 Election Denial: Wyoming lawmakers are looking to strip the secretary of state’s duties to oversee the state’s elections after a candidate who denies the result of the 2020 presidential election won the Republican primary to lead the office. On a voice vote Thursday, the state’s Republican-dominated Joint Committee on Corporations, Elections and Political Subdivisions approved a motion to draft legislation stripping the office’s sole authority to oversee the state’s elections and creating an entity overseen by all five of the state’s top elected officials. “We have a 2024 presidential election coming up. It’s going to be very contentious. And I do have some concern that the most likely person who will be our next chief elections officer, secretary of state, has alleged that there may be nefarious activities at the ballot box in Wyoming, which I don’t agree exists,” Cheyenne Republican Dan Zwonitzer said, introducing the motion. “I think our elections are safe and secure, probably more than any other state’s in the country,” he added. “And so I’m concerned, based on some of the rhetoric and the mailers I saw in regards to our most likely incoming secretary of state, that we may be in a precarious position when it comes to election administration for the next four years.”

In The States 

FLORIDA: Voters Arrested In DeSantis’s Crackdown On “Fraud” Were Told They Were Eligible To Vote 

  • Politico: Defendants Targeted In Desantis’ Voter Fraud Crackdown Were Told They Could Vote: Several people who were arrested last week as part of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ voter fraud crackdown were notified by official government entities they were eligible to vote, according to court documents and interviews. The defendants told authorities they had no intention of committing voter fraud, according to affidavits, and in some cases were baffled by their arrests because counties had sent them voter registration cards and approved them to vote. The defendants were vilified by the governor during a high profile press conference last week, where DeSantis announced the arrest of 20 people — convicted murderers and sex offenders — who allegedly cast votes in the 2020 election when they weren’t eligible to. The defendants, because of their convictions, weren’t permitted to vote. 

NEW HAMPSHIRE:  Yet Another Far Right Election Denier Is Poised To Win The GOP Senate Nomination In New Hampshire 

  • New York Times: In New Hampshire, Republicans Weigh Another Hard Right Candidate: He has said the state’s popular Republican governor is “a Chinese Communist sympathizer,” called for the repeal of the 17th Amendment allowing direct popular election of senators and raised the possibility of abolishing the F.B.I. The man behind these statements is Don Bolduc, a retired Army general who leads the Republican field in what should be a competitive race for the New Hampshire Senate seat held by Senator Maggie Hassan, a Democrat. In one primary after another this year, Republican voters have chosen hard-right candidates who party officials had warned would have trouble winning in November, and Mr. Bolduc could be on course to be the next. Like him, many embraced former President Donald J. Trump’s election denial. “I signed a letter with 120 other generals and admirals saying that Donald Trump won the election and, damn it, I stand by” it, Mr. Bolduc said at a recent debate. The suddenly fraught midterm landscape for Republicans caused Senator Mitch McConnell, the G.O.P. leader, to complain recently that poor “candidate quality” could cost his party a majority in the Senate that had long seemed the likely result. In the final competitive primary of the year, scheduled for Sept. 13, Republican officials in New Hampshire are echoing Mr. McConnell. They warn that grass-roots voters are poised to elect another problematic nominee, Mr. Bolduc, and jeopardize a winnable race against a vulnerable Democrat.

NORTH CAROLINA: Conspiracy Theorists Fight New NC Election Rules To Limit Aggressive Poll Watching Activities 

  • Raleigh News and Observer: Republicans Fight New NC Election Rules, Led By Trump Lawyer Central To 2020 Conspiracies: Claiming to have already trained over 1,000 people to volunteer to help run this November’s elections, conservative activists in North Carolina are opposing new rules that would more strictly regulate those volunteers’ behavior at polling places. They won a key victory Thursday — with support from a controversial lawyer heavily involved in the unsuccessful plan to overturn the results of the 2020 election — when a GOP-dominated board voted to block the proposed rules from going into place. The rules came from the N.C. State Board of Elections and contained many changes governing the behavior of election workers as well as political-party volunteers at polling places. Most were aimed at cutting down on harassment and aggressive political behavior at voting sites — as well as banning poll workers from providing “inaccurate information about the administration of the election.” Republicans strongly opposed the rules, saying they were overly broad and vague. One such critic is Cleta Mitchell, a 2020 election lawyer for former President Donald Trump who recently moved to Moore County, southwest of Raleigh. Shortly after she asked the N.C. Rules Review Commission on Thursday to block the proposed rules, the commission voted to do just that, ruling that the elections board lacked the authority to make the changes it wanted.

PENNSYLVANIA: Doug Mastriano Bets He Can Win Without Moderating His Far Right Positions 

  • Washington Post: Pa. Governor Hopeful Bets He Can Win By Not Moderating Trumpian Stances: Since winning the primary in May with 44 percent of the vote — after snagging a last-minute endorsement from former president Donald Trump and surviving a late scramble to consolidate the vote against him — Mastriano has eschewed the typical path of reorienting his campaign toward the middle. Instead, he has held fast to the same issues that drove his rise after attending the Stop the Steal rally in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, and openly embracing Christian nationalism. But many Republicans say Mastriano’s focus on base voters has made it hard for him to raise money and broaden his appeal, hurting the party’s chances in November. Mastriano’s latest campaign finance report showed less than $400,000 as of June, and the campaign hasn’t bought any airtime on local TV. He only grants interviews to friendly outlets such as right-wing talk radio and the podcast hosted by former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon. The campaign did not respond to requests for comment for this article.
  • Reuters: Pennsylvania Candidate Mastriano Posed In Confederate Uniform At Army War College: Three years before retiring from the U.S. Army in 2017, Donald Trump-backed Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano posed in Confederate uniform for a faculty photo at the Army War College, according to a copy of the photo obtained by Reuters. The previously unreported photo, released by the War College to Reuters after a request under the Freedom of Information Act, showed Mastriano in a 2013-14 portrait for the Department of Military Strategy, Plans, and Operations, where he worked.

What Experts Are Saying

Andrew Weissmann, senior prosecutor in the special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election: “Above all, the redacted affidavit (and an accompanying brief explaining the redactions), which was released on Friday, reveals more evidence of a righteous criminal case related to protecting information vital to our nation’s security.” NYT Op-Ed: We Knew the Justice Department Case Was Righteous. This Affidavit Confirms It.

Michael Stern, former senior counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives: “[F]rom a legal and constitutional standpoint NARA was not only justified in denying Trump’s assertion of executive privilege. It really had no choice in the matter.” Just Security: Assessing Trump’s Claim of ‘Executive Privilege’ on FBI Access to MAL Docs

Norman Eisen, senior fellow at Brookings and the co-founder and executive chair of States United Democracy Center, re: recently released Barr memo: “Current Attorney General Merrick Garland and his colleagues should be applauded for not pursuing this appeal further and for releasing the memo. They might have adhered to the traditional norm of protecting the Justice Department’s internal deliberations. But adherence to norms when they don’t fit egregious circumstances is what got Mueller in trouble. When dealing with Trump and his enablers, a different approach is required. That is a lesson to all of us going forward.” Slate Op-Ed 

Nathan Kalmoe, professor at Louisiana State University, re: reporting of rising threats directed at the National Archives: “In our book, [Lilliana Mason] and & I found that public support (esp Rep support) for threats against officials was greatest at times when Trump was in greatest legal peril — namely amidst his two impeachments. Not surprising to see a rise in threats now.” Tweet 

Headlines

The MAGA Movement And The Ongoing Threat To Elections

Axios: Hogan says there are signs of authoritarianism in GOP

The Guardian: ‘The US could lose the right to vote within months’: Top official warns on threat to democracy

New York Times: QAnon Accounts Found a Home, and Trump’s Support, on Truth Social

Washington Post: ‘Semi-fascism’: Rhetoric reflects newly aggressive Biden strategy

January 6 And The 2020 Election

NBC: Jan. 6 committee will dig in on the money behind the riot, Kinzinger says

Other Trump Investigations 

New York Times: Possibility of Obstruction Looms Over Trump After Thwarted Efforts to Recover Documents

New York Times: Classified Material on Human Intelligence Sources Helped Trigger Alarm

New York Times: Trump’s Legal Team Scrambles to Find an Argument

Pittsburgh Post Gazette: Inventing Anna, The Tale Of A Fake Heiress, Mar-A-Lago, and An FBI Investigation 

Politico: Intel officials to assess national security fallout from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago documents

Political Violence

CNN: Motorist charged with threatening Utah Senate candidate with gun

In The States 

Associated Press: Arizona Supreme Court keeps voting rights measure off ballot

CNN: Michigan GOP formally nominates two Trump-backed election deniers for key statewide offices

New York Times: DeSantis Suspends 4 Elected School Board Members After Report on Parkland